Hide Glue for Beginners

I promised in a recent construction series about my current project to do a ”how to get started in hide glue” tutorial, but in researching for useful photos and making sure my facts were correct, I took a second look at a series of videos with Patrick Edwards on Kieth Cruickshank’s “Woodtreks” blog. I decided that if you want to learn about hide glue I’ll let a real expert tell you about it and in video at that.
You may want to watch these several times....

There are lots of myths around hide glue like it isn’t very strong, won’t last as long as modern glues,smells really bad, won’t keep long once hydrated, is really messy and hard to work with and that getting it wet will ruin it.
There are more but I’ll start with these and you can question me about any others you may be worrying about.
1) Not very strong. In fact even the weaker hot animal glues are stronger than most modern glues and ultimately who cares because...

I know that some of you are interested in trying hide glue but think it is messy or inconvenient / slow to apply on larger glue-ups. I can tell you about it all day but maybe a video will be worth a few hundred words.
I am currently knocking a bench together using lapped layers of plywood to give me the effect of finger jointed 4 1/2” x 3 3/4” material for the trestle legs. With hide glue, the lack of need for clamping makes this a very easy lay-up to fire together with a stapl...

I’m working on a new top for the sliding hatch on my sailboat to replace the $136 piece of medium bronze acrylic that I sat on the other day…. Crack !!!.... This time I cold molded a curved panel from 3 layers of 1/8” cedar on opposing diagonals and decided to make it appear to be a solid mahogany hatch. This would be difficult to press with either my screw press or clamps and would require substantial jigging to vacuum bag so the obvious answer seemed to be to hammer it. Of...

Today I was pressing some marquetry that was 26” long. That’s not necessarily a problem with hot hide glue unless your press is only 20” square like mine. Fortunately when I designed my press, I made accommodation for pressing much larger panels than will fit in the press itself by adding the two cheap bar-b-ques on the lower shelf.Here’s how the whole thing works.
First of all I set out my substrate and marquetry panel and applied hot glue to the whole surface of t...

When I posted “Arnie’s Tea Box” http://lumberjocks.com/projects/50187 one of the comments (Roger) was that these boxes make a great venue for displaying my marquetry. I totally agree but that meant streamlining the process of making the box. First was to come up with a jig to make the corners perfect every time quickly.
Here is what I came up with.
Disclaimer: I’m not a jig person so my jigs are usually utilitarian and often “throw away”.
This phot...